Abraham's Seed and Generosity

I went to the second session of my church’s Bible study.  We’re going through The Unbreakable Promise: God’s Covenants with Abraham, Moses, and David With Michael Rydelnik.  I have two items: Abraham’s seed, and generosity being motivated by faith that God will work things out.

1.  Paul says in Galatians 3:16: ” Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”

I said in the group that I thought Paul’s reasoning here was pretty poor.  Michael Rydelnik on the DVD employed similar argumentation.  What I recall Rydelnik saying is that there is a shift to the singular in the Hebrew of Genesis 22:17.  Genesis 22:17 states: “That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies” (Genesis 22:17).  According to Rydelnik, the seed that will possess the gate of his enemies is Christ.  The thing is, though, I’m not sure where exactly Rydelnik believes the shift to the singular is, for the Hebrew word for seed, zera, is singular throughout Genesis 22:17.  Zera often is a collective noun: it is singular, yet it is collective, like the words “nation,” or “community.”  Even if zera is in the singular, it can still refer to a group of people rather than a single individual.

One person in the group, whom I will call “Joe,” responded that we have to look at the context: when the passage is talking about Abraham’s seed being more numerous than the stars of heaven, or Abraham’s seed possessing the land of Canaan, then the seed there is collective and applies to the nation of Israel; when it says that all the nations will be blessed through Abraham’s seed, however, then the seed there is Christ, for the only time when all the nations were blessed through Abraham’s seed was when they received salvation through faith in Christ.

I did not find Joe’s argument to be entirely convincing (though I let him have the last word), for he seemed to be assuming Christianity to argue for Christianity.  Where does Genesis ever say that Abraham’s seed blessing the nations will entail people becoming saved and going to heaven after they die because they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior?  Are there other ways to understand the blessing that Abraham’s seed brings to the nations, ways that are more faithful to themes within the Hebrew Bible itself: Jacob bringing blessing to Laban when he was working for him, Joseph bringing blessing to the nations amidst famine as vizier of Egypt, or Israel bringing the nations knowledge of the one true God, in its history or in its time of eschatological restoration?  Even Michael Rydelnik seemed to acknowledge some multifaceted application to God’s promises to Abraham.

And yet, Joe’s comments made me think: Does “seed” always mean a collective?  Could it ever refer to a single individual?  Someone else in the group made that sort of point: a person has offspring, and the offspring has offspring, etc.  I did a search after I came home, and it appears that zera can sometimes refer to a particular person.  In Genesis 4:25, after Eve gives birth to Seth, Adam says that God has given him seed in place of Abel.  Seth is a zera.

But maybe the singular and the collective can overlap, on some level.  Seth is a zera, and yet he will also produce a line.  Even within the New Testament, Paul acknowledges that Abraham’s seed is collective.  Granted, Paul believes that Abraham’s seed was Jesus Christ, yet Paul also argues that those who have faith are Abraham’s seed (i.e., Galatians 3:29).

I may have overstated my case in the group by arguing that zera is always collective.  I still don’t think that Paul’s argument in Galatians 3:16 is very good, at least in terms of supporting his interpretation of Genesis.  One can say that Paul was following rabbinic methods of interpretation, or that Paul was speaking to insiders to the Christian community rather than trying to convince outsiders.  Perhaps, but I would have to hear more before those proposals sit well with me.

2.  In Genesis 13, Abraham lets Lot have the land of his choice after their herdsmen dispute due to lack of room.  Michael Rydelnik contends that Abraham could be so generous because he realized that God would eventually give all of the land to him (or at least his offspring), anyway.  In my opinion, that made Abraham’s generosity sound less than generous, for Abraham is still thinking about what’s in it for him.  At the same time, I do appreciate the theme that I am more likely to give to others when I firmly believe that God loves me and will work things out for my good.  Attaining that sort of faith and then maintaining it can be rather difficult, however.

Book Write-Up: A Walk in the Garden

Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer, ed.  A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden.  England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992.

A Walk in the Garden contains seventeen contributions by scholars about the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2-3.  Why did I decide to read this book?  The Garden of Eden story has long intrigued and puzzled me.  As someone who came from a Christian background, I was taught that the Garden of Eden story was about the Fall and original sin, which threw the whole universe into a mess, and which Jesus Christ would later come to earth to redress.  But I would encounter other interpretations elsewhere.  A professor in biblical studies at my undergraduate institution taught and wrote that the Garden of Eden story was not about a Fall, per se, but rather about humanity moving from innocence into a state of intelligence and cultural creation, as well as the struggle to demarcate the boundary between the human and the divine.  I heard from religious Jews that Judaism did not believe in original sin but interpreted Genesis 2-3 differently from Christians.

The Garden story itself contained details that perplexed me.  Why, for example, did God not want Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  What is wrong with knowing good and evil?  Isn't distinguishing between good and evil a good thing elsewhere in the Bible?  And does not God say that he himself knows good and evil, as God laments that Adam and Eve now are like God, knowing good and evil?  Why is knowing good and evil bad for humans, but a good thing for God?  And why did God expel Adam and Eve from the Garden?  What would be so wrong with Adam and Eve staying in the Garden of Eden, partaking of the Tree of Life?

I can't say that I found answers to every one of my questions in A Walk of the Garden (or maybe the answers were there, and I missed them!).  But the book was still interesting.  The book covered a variety of topics, but, if I could locate a central issue that encompasses most of the essays in the book, it would be this: Was the "Fall" in Genesis 2-3 something negative, or something positive (or at least not-so-negative)? 

There were a couple of essays that argued that Genesis 2-3 concerned the transition of humans from a state of innocence to one of intelligence and cultural creation.  One article even stated that Genesis 2-3 is about how humans became like God----in God's image, as Genesis 1 states.  And, according to the article, human beings after the "Fall" indeed resembled God in the biblical narrative: God is at conflict with humanity, which was why God sent the Flood, and human beings became rather alienated from each other after eating the forbidden fruit.

Christianity treated the "Fall" as something negative that Jesus Christ would fix with his obedience to God.  An article on feminist attempts to rehabilitate Eve talks about how Christianity reinforced misogyny by blaming the Fall on Eve, and by seeing sex as a means for the transmission of original sin.  The article quotes feminist theologian Mary Daly, who does not believe that portraying Mary as a new Eve really corrects the problem, since the Christian narrative still stigmatizes childbirth and women by making Mary an exception among women.

Elements of Gnosticism regarded the "Fall" as positive, as human beings attaining knowledge that a sinister sub-deity wanted to keep from them, leading the sub-deity to expel them from the Garden and to burden them with tasks that would distract them from thinking about their spiritual identity.  The article on Judaism opened by saying that Judaism did not believe in original sin, and yet it gave indications that prominent elements of Judaism still deemed the events in Genesis 2-3 to be quite negative: within rabbinic Judaism was the notion that the Torah would correct the ills that the "Fall" brought, at least for the nation of Israel; and elements of Kabbalistic Judaism held that the "Fall" was an event that disrupted the cosmos.  At the same time, in the endnotes to the article, there is a reference to a modern Jewish interpretation that regards the "Fall" as something positive, the same way that the exile of the Jews was positive because it enabled them to carry the knowledge of God beyond Israel.  According to a couple of articles, Christian theologian Karl Barth held fast to seeing the Fall as negative.  According to one of the articles on Barth, the story of the Fall is about human attempts to judge good and evil for themselves, as opposed to relying on God.  And there was an article about how Genesis 2-3 may relate to the Oedipus and Elektra complexes: the story reflects how children enter maturity as they learn that they cannot have whatever they want.

I wish that the articles about the Fall being positive (or at least not as negative as Christians say) would have dealt more extensively with a salient feature of the story: that God was commanding the first humans not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the humans disobeyed God on that point.  In most cases throughout the Hebrew Bible, disobeying God is a bad thing.  Why would it be a good thing, or at least something that is not so horrible, in Genesis 2-3?  I'm not saying that the traditional Christian interpretation lacks its share of problems and inadequately answered questions, but I wanted to see more developed arguments in the articles about the Fall being not-so-negative.  For example, it would have been nice had the historical-critical articles tracked down possible ancient Near Eastern tales in which a deity could be fallible, and disobedience of a deity can be something positive.  

Apart from the question of whether the "Fall" was negative or not-so-negative, the book offered some interesting details.  I learned that Immanuel Kant was quite negative about human beings (in contrast with the optimistic tone that theology was taking for some time), and that the psychologist Carl Jung detested the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible.  One article on Jung stated that Jung was promoting an allegorical method of biblical interpretation, one that looked for symbols in the Bible, as ancient Christian interpreters did (though Jung's allegorical interpretation was most likely different from that of ancient Christians).  Some of the topics in the book did not particularly interest me.  I, for example, don't really care about how Kavka treated the Fall.  But I respect that there are people who are interested in that.

Does The Genesis Code Fudge the Bible to Make It Agree with Science?

I promised yesterday that I would write a blog post about the 2010 Christian movie, The Genesis Code, specifically the scene in which it claims that the sequence of creation in Genesis 1 matches what scientific consensus says about the order in which things appeared in the universe and on earth.  You can watch snippets from that scene here.

I've long been interested in this question, ever since I read biblical scholar Joel Rosenberg's statement in the HarperCollins Study Bible that "Remarkably, [Genesis 1's] order of life-forms resembles that of our modern theory of evolution: vegetation, swarming creatures, fish, birds, animals (mammals), and human beings."  Granted, as I talked about yesterday, The Genesis Code does not appear to agree with the existence of macro-evolution, but its scene in which science and believers in Genesis 1 dialogue about the order of natural events in the history of the universe and the earth was the sort of thing that I've long desired to see (in real life, though, with real scientists).

What I'll do in my post today is this: I will post Genesis 1 in the King James Version, which is in the public domain, and I will add comments about each day of creation.  When appropriate, I will mention how the pastor in the movie summarizes the content of the creation day under discussion.  More importantly, I will tell you what the scientist-characters in the movie say about what occurred at each stage of natural history.  My question will be this: Is there truly agreement between Genesis 1 and science regarding the order of events in natural history, or is the movie fudging one or both sides to artificially foster an agreement?  I'll be referring to sources, some of them pretty good, and some of them, well, I wish I could find better!  Moreover, please keep in mind that I am not a scientist----far from it!  But this post is not intended to be the last word on this subject, but rather my aim is to ask questions.  Please feel free to correct me, but I will not publish or interact with comments that say or imply that I or anyone else is stupid.

Here we go!

Genesis 1

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Comments: The pastor said that the waters of v 2 represent all that was, and that the darkness in that verse is symbolic of chaos.  What happened on the first "day" of creation, which (according to the presenter on the movie) was 15.75-7.7 billion years ago?  A scientist-character said that there was the Big Bang, and with it came the raw material for all that would exist (i.e., protons, neutrons, electrons).  The earth was only in the form of stardust.  There was a ball of plasma from which light initially could not escape, due to gravity, but, with cooling, expansion, and the reduction of gravity, electromagnetic radiation finally managed to escape, meaning there was light.  Stars and galaxies were formed.

I thought that the pastor was fudging Genesis 1 here by not taking the waters of Genesis 1:2 at face value.  The waters, in my opinion, are significant, for it is on the issue of the waters that Genesis 1 overlaps with the ancient Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish.  In Genesis 1, God separates the waters; in Enuma Elish, the god Marduk splits up the sea-goddess Tiamat.  The pastor near the end of the discussion says that Genesis 1 (whoever is its human author) must be divinely-inspired, for an ancient author on his own could not have been so accurate about the order in which things came to be, long before science found out about it.  But, by interpreting the waters in Genesis 1:2 as symbolic, the pastor is (intentionally or unintentionally, I do not know) obscuring where Genesis 1 overlaps with another ancient creation account.  Is Genesis 1 ahead of its time, or is it (in some manner) echoing or reflecting its ancient context?  In his push to prove the former, the pastor is interpreting the waters of Genesis 1:2 as symbolic, when they very well might be literal, which would mean that there is good reason to believe that the latter (that Genesis 1 is reflecting its own ancient context) is the case.
I was surprised, however, that a bigger deal was not made about the plasma.  I was expecting for someone to say that the plasma was the primordial waters of Genesis 1:2.  Plasma, according to this article, can have properties like those of a liquid.

I'll talk more about stardust and stars when I talk about Day 4.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Comments: The pastor said that, on Day 2, the heavens were created and chaos was separated out.  A scientist then said that the second period of time had the galaxy and the Milky Way, along with the sun and the earth.  I'll talk more about the sun when I get to Day 4.

I agree with the pastor that Genesis 1 is about God bringing order out of chaos, for the sea and the waters in the Hebrew Bible often relate to chaos.  And yet, as I said in my comments on Day 1, I think that the pastor is fudging Genesis 1 by not interpreting the waters as literal.  On Day 2, God divides the waters, putting some waters above the firmament and some waters beneath the firmament.  In my opinion, that's different from the galaxy and the Milky Way forming.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

Comments: The pastor said that Day 3 had oceans, dry land, and the "first forms of plant-life."  A scientist said that, 3.75 billion to 1.75 billion years ago, the earth cooled, water formed, and there emerged early plant and animal life, bacteria, and photosynthetic algae.

I have a variety of points, which may come across as nit-picking, but you can do with my points what you will.  First of all, Genesis 1 does not say that liquid water came to exist on the third day of creation; rather, the waters already existed during the first and second days.  What is occurring on Day 3 is that God is organizing the waters beneath into seas.  Second, there's not supposed to be any animal life on Day 3, for God created the sea-creatures on Day 5, and the land-creatures on Day 6.  This is actually significant, for, according to this article, scientists generally maintain that fruit trees came to exist after there were fish, and that marine organisms existed prior to the development of land plants, whereas Genesis 1 appears to present the opposite (fruit trees and land plants preceded sea-creatures). 

There is a literary pattern going on in Genesis 1, as many observers have noted: On Days 1-3, God created places.  On Days 4-6, God created the inhabitants for those places.  God creates day and night on Day 1, and he populates day and night with heavenly bodies on Day 4.  Day 2 sees the division of the waters above (in the firmament) from the waters beneath, and, on Day 4, God creates the birds for the firmament and the sea-creatures for the waters beneath.  On Day 3, dry land and plants appear, and, on Day 6, God creates animals and human beings.  Genesis 1 has a neat pattern, but my impression is that most scientists do not believe that real life followed that neat pattern to a T (even though there may have been some overlap----sea creatures came before land creatures, for example).

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Comments: A scientists talked about what went on 1.75 billion to 750 million years ago.  Initially, the atmosphere was "opaque."  But, as oxygen became concentrated into the atmosphere, it became more translucent, and the sun, moon, and stars became visible.

I have two points.  First of all, this movie says that there were stars and galaxies on Day 1, and that the sun came to exist on Day 2.  But, as far as I can see, that is not what Genesis 1 is saying.  Rather, Genesis 1 appears to be saying that God created the sun and the stars on the fourth day, not that they merely became apparent after having already existed for a long time.  My second point is merely a question, not a dogmatic statement: How did the plants of Day 3 survive for so many years without sunlight?  This is a critique that I have heard of the Day-Age interpretation of Genesis 1----the view that each day in Genesis 1 represents long periods of time.  The movie tries to distance itself from the Day-Age interpretation, saying that it believes that God made the heavens and the earth in six days----but what were days to God amounted to longer periods of time from the standpoint of the universe and the earth.  Still, the same question can be asked of this movie's scenario (and maybe even of science, if science indeed believes that the sun became visible to the earth after plants had been around for a long time).

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Comments: The fifth day, for this movie, occurred 750 million to 250 million years ago.  During that time, sea life was dominant.  But, a scientist-character continues, 530 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion occurred, and every specie of land animal simultaneously appeared.

I have some points.  My first one will be rather nit-picky.  So is this movie saying that land animals came to exist on the fifth day?  Genesis 1 says that land animals came to exist on Day 6 of creation.  Second, referring again to the table in this article, most scientists believe that birds evolved from land animals, not that they existed before land animals (whereas Genesis 1 says that birds were created on the fifth day, and land animals on the sixth day).  See also this article, which discusses the debate about which land animals birds evolved from. 

Regarding the Cambrian explosion, this article aims to account for it from an evolutionary perspective.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

The sixth day, according to this movie, went from 250 million years ago to the time of Adam.  During that time, there were extinctions, and mammals and birds came to be dominant.  Then, human beings appeared.

I like this interpretation better than Young Earth creationism, for The Genesis Code simply places the dinosaurs in Day 6 of creation, rather than holding that they co-existed with human beings.  But I have some points.  First of all, to repeat what I said regarding Day 5, there is the bird problem: Genesis 1 says that birds existed before land animals, whereas science says that they evolved from certain land animals.  Second, this movie obviously believes that there was death before the Fall of Adam and Eve, whereas Romans 5:12 says that death entered the world by sin.  Granted, there are Christians who will argue that Romans 5:12 is talking about human death, not animal and plant death.  Fine, that would make a fine topic for discussion.  I'm just saying that the movie invites this sort of discussion.  Third, Genesis 1:30 says that God has given plants to the animals as food.  It's on the basis of passages like this that many interpreters maintain that, according to the Bible (or a voice within the Bible), people and animals were vegetarians until after the Flood.  Does The Genesis Code agree with this, or does it maintain that animals ate other animals prior to the Flood?  It seems to me that, if there were extinctions going on during the sixth day of creation, as the movie suggests, then animals eating other animals had to play some role in that.  But would acknowledging that animals ate other animals before the Flood go against Genesis 1, which appears to maintain that people and animals were originally vegetarian?

My conclusion: Genesis 1 and science may overlap in areas (i.e., sea creatures came before land creatures), but there are also differences between them.  In my opinion, The Genesis Code fudges the Bible to make it fit with science.

Genesis 29:31-30:24 and the Clusters of Tribes in Numbers

In the Book of Numbers, certain tribes of Israel are clustered together.  We see this in Numbers 2, which places three tribes on each of the four sides of the Tabernacle.  The same clusters appear in Numbers 7, in which leaders of the tribes bring gifts to the Tabernacle.  And, in Numbers 10:11-28, we see the order in which each tribal cluster moves out from Sinai.

Why are certain tribes grouped with certain other tribes?  And why are these tribes put in a particular order----i.e., Judah is first, etc.?  In this post, I'll address this question by appealing primarily to Genesis 29:31-30:24, in which Leah and Rachel give birth to the fathers of the tribes of Israel.

The first tribal cluster consists of Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun.  They camp on the east side of the Tabernacle, and they are also the first three tribes to bring gifts to the Tabernacle in Numbers 7.  Moreover, they are the first to depart from Sinai.  Judah appears to precede Issachar in importance, and Issachar appears to precede Zebulun.

Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun are the third, fourth, and fifth sons, respectively, of Jacob's wife Leah.  So why are they the most important cluster, and not Leah's first, second, and third sons?  Leah's first son, Reuben, was disqualified as firstborn because he slept with Jacob's concubine (Genesis 35:22; 49:3-4; I Chronicles 5:1).  Leah's second and third sons were Simeon and Levi, respectively, and they were scattered in Israel because of their slaughter of the Shechemites (Genesis 34:25-31; 49:5-7).  Consequently, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun, the next in line, appear to take their place as the most important tribes.

The second tribal cluster consists of Reuben, Simeon, and Gad.  As I said above, Reuben and Simeon are the first and second sons, respectively, of Leah.  Leah's third son, Levi, is not included in this cluster because the Levites were to be servants of the Tabernacle, and so they were not a part of any tribal cluster.  The third tribe, Gad, is the firstborn son of Leah's maid Zilpah.

The third tribal cluster consists of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin.  Ephraim and Manasseh are sons of Joseph, the son of Rachel.  Ephraim precedes Manasseh in importance in Numbers just as he does in Genesis 48, in which Jacob blesses his grandsons and makes them like his own sons.  And Benjamin is the second son of Rachel.  The sons of Leah come first in importance, and then the sons of Rachel follow.  Could this be because God honored Leah as the underdog, the wife whom Jacob did not love (see Genesis 29:31)?

The fourth tribal cluster consists of Dan, Asher, and Naphtali.  Dan is the firstborn son of Rachel's maid Bilhah, and, as Jacob Milgrom notes, he is the first among the sons of Israel to be born to one of Jacob's concubines, which, according to Milgrom, is probably the reason that Dan is the head of this cluster.  Naphtali is the second son of Bilhah and the second son born to one of Jacob's concubines.  And Asher is the second son of Leah's maid Zilpah.  Remember that the first son of Leah's maid Zilpah, Gad, is in the second tribal cluster, along with Leah's first and second sons.

The general pattern here is that Leah's sons come first, then Rachel's sons follow, and finally we have the sons of the concubines.  But this pattern is not air-tight, for there needed to be a third person in the second cluster for there to be twelve tribes surrounding the Tabernacle, and this was solved by putting the first son of Leah's maid into it.  Moreover, while the order of birth often determines the importance of the tribes in terms of their arrangement, that is not an absolute, for the first cluster is younger than the second cluster, and Ephraim is younger than Manasseh yet is more important.

Jubilees, Genesis 1-2, and Leviticus 12

In Enoch and the Mosaic Torah: The Evidence of Jubilees, Lutz Doering has an essay on "Purity and Impurity in the Book of Jubilees".

Genesis 1 appears to present the first woman as being created at the same time as the first man, whereas the creation account in Genesis 2 says that the woman was created after the man and was brought to him.  According to Doering, Jubilees 3:8 attempts to harmonize this by saying that Adam and Eve were both created in the first week, but Eve was shown to Adam in the second week.  Why?

Doering maintains that Jubilees' use of Leviticus 12 is relevant to this question.  According to Leviticus 12, a woman who gives birth to a boy is unclean for seven days and is in a process of purification for thirty-three days, during which time she cannot touch a holy thing.  If she gives birth to a female, then her time of impurity is fourteen days, and her process of purification lasts for sixty-six days.  After her purification, the woman brings to the Tabernacle a burnt offering and a sin offering.  Jubilees 3:10-11 mentions this law about the purification of the woman, but Jubilees 3 holds that Eve was impure for seven days after her creation and then was brought to her husband, and that Adam and Eve were created outside of the Garden, as Adam was brought in after a purification time of forty days, and Eve after a purification time of eighty days (see Jubilees 3).  The Garden was a holy place, and so Adam and Eve needed to be pure before entering it.

But Eve was not a mother at the time, so how could Leviticus 12 apply to her?  Doering plays with the idea that there was an ancient Jewish view that Leviticus 12 applied to the child, not just the mother, which may be implying that Adam and Eve were technically children in the sense that God brought them into being.  But Doering finds that argument to be inconclusive.  Doering concludes that "Adam and his wife represent human beings (construed as Israelites) confronted with the sanctuary and become part of the life cycle entailing defilement" (page 263).  Moreover, Doering states that Adam and Eve in Jubilees become pure simply by waiting, for they don't bring sacrifices as part of their purification, as there was not yet a priesthood.  It's interesting what laws Jubilees thinks were applicable prior to Sinai, and which laws were not.  Because Cain, Abel, and Noah offered sacrifices, I do not think that the absence of the priesthood accounts for why Adam and Eve did not bring sacrifices as part of their purification.  Perhaps Adam and Eve didn't do so in Jubilees because animals were not killed before the sin of Adam and Eve.

Doering also talks about how Jubilees aims to keep sex out of the Garden of Eden, the reason being that sex was ritually defiling (Leviticus 15:18).  Consequently, in Jubilees, Adam and Eve have sex before and after their time in the Garden, but not during.  Doering mentions Qumran's prohibition on sex in the Temple city, and the ban in CD 11:4-5 and Jubilees 50:8 on having sex on the Sabbath, a holy day.  (Jubilees even mandates the death penalty for that.)  There is an attempt to protect the holy from the ritually defiling.  This stood out to me because I have heard that Judaism considers it a mitzvah to have sex on the Sabbath (see here).

Completing Jacob and the Divine Trickster

I finished John Anderson's Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and YHWH's Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle.

Anderson's argument appears to be that God supported Jacob's deception of people and Laban's deception of Jacob as ways to fulfill God's promises to Abraham: that Abraham would have numerous offspring, which would possess the Promised Land and be a means for the nations to experience blessing, and (if they curse Israel) cursing.  According to Anderson, Laban's deception of Jacob in giving Jacob Leah instead of Rachel was not divine punishment of Jacob for deceiving Esau; rather, Laban's deception gave Jacob two wives, which enabled Jacob to have lots of offspring.  Moreover, Jacob's negative experiences at the hands of Laban set the stage for Jacob to leave Laban and go to the Promised Land, after his presence with Laban had brought Laban blessing.  Anderson also shows that God in the Genesis narrative endorses Jacob's shady ploy to breed spotted and speckled animals, the ones Laban agreed would be Jacob's, for God saw Jacob's affliction at the hands of Laban.  And, after Jacob reunited with Esau, Jacob deceives Esau when he tries to get out of going with Esau to Seir, for Jacob wants to head to the Promised Land.

Anderson's discussion of Genesis 32 was a good read, especially on account of his insight that God disjointed Jacob's thigh and gave him a limp to remind Jacob of God's commitment to him within the covenant.  Anderson appeals to Genesis 24, in which Abraham's servant puts his hand under Abraham's thigh in making a promise to Abraham.  I was a little unclear, however, about why Anderson believes that God wrestled with Jacob.  Anderson argues that Jacob's wrestling with God had something to do with Jacob's wrestling with Esau, which was lifelong but which was a concern of Jacob when he was wrestling with God, since Jacob feared that Esau would kill him.  Perhaps Anderson's idea is that God wrestled with Jacob to show Jacob that he would survive his wrestling with Esau.  Yet, there is something significant in the text about Jacob wrestling and prevailing with God, specifically, and I wish that Anderson had gone into more detail about that (or perhaps he did and I missed it). 

Anderson does not go into a great deal of detail about when the divine trickster idea would have appealed to Israel, but he does speculate on page 176 that it would have spoken especially to Israelites dealing with empire----such as Assyria, Babylon, and Persia----for he says that "one has less use for a trickster God if one is in a position of power and authority."  In my opinion, the divine trickster idea looks pretty good when its supposed historical setting is juxtaposed with Anderson's view on the idea's theological significance: that it pertains to God's commitment to God's covenant with Israel, which blesses Israel and the nations.  I can somewhat sympathize with the divine trickster idea when it relates to God helping a people who were vulnerable in the face of powerful interests.  Otherwise, the divine trickster idea can easily degenerate into us vs. them (Israel vs. the nations, with God supporting Israel), unless the notion that Israel blesses the nations somehow counterbalances that.

Challenging Some Prominent Evangelical Narratives

I started John Anderson's Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and YHWH's Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle.

I'd like to start this post by sharing my experiences in evangelical circles.  In evangelical circles, whenever we read or talked about the Book of Genesis, we boldly proclaimed that the stories in the Book of Genesis communicate the message that God is patient with us despite our moral screw-ups.  That does not mean that God approves of our moral screw-ups, for our misdeeds can have bad consequences, or God may punish us as a form of discipline.  But God does not stop loving us, and God also works good out of bad situations.  In the Book of Genesis, the argument runs, God's people screw up: Abraham and Isaac lie to a king to save their own skin, Jacob often deceives people, etc.  And, indeed (the argument is still running), there are cases in which God appears to punish God's people, as when Jacob, who deceived his father Isaac to get the blessing, is himself deceived when Laban gives Jacob Leah instead of Rachel.  But God is still committed to Jacob, and Jacob presumably grows as a person.

I have to admit that I have not always found this evangelical narrative to be satisfying.  (And I'm not saying that it's the only evangelical narrative out there about the Book of Genesis, but I have heard it enough times and in enough places to conclude that it's a prominent narrative within evangelicalism.)  I suppose that I was somewhat convinced by the argument that God demonstrated his disapproval of Jacob's lying by arranging for Jacob himself to be deceived by Laban.  And perhaps an argument can be made that there were negative consequences of the way that Jacob lived his life: Jacob deceived others, and his sons, Simeon and Levi, deceived the Shechemites, slaughtered them, and brought the anger of the nations on the people of Jacob.  But I've wondered: If God is disciplining his people in Genesis for their moral lapses, why do they continue to make the same "mistakes" over and over?  Abraham not only lied to the Pharaoh and Abimelech, but he says in Genesis 20:13 that, everywhere he goes, he claims that Sarah is his sister, not his wife.  It evidently does not register with Abraham that what he is doing in wrong.  If God is disciplining Abraham, then God has failed, or is not communicating to Abraham what is going on.  Regarding Jacob, Jacob deceives throughout much of the story.  Even after Jacob suffers exile from his family for deceiving Isaac, he continues to mislead people in some manner: he tells Esau after they reunite, for example, that he will catch up with him, then he goes another direction.

Another issue that I have encountered in evangelical circles, albeit rarely, is that of divine deception.  Usually, this issue comes up when we are reading the Bible and come across a passage that offends our moral sensibilities, and so we try to explain it away.  For example, in I Kings 22, God sends a lying spirit to the false prophets.  Why would God intentionally try to mislead people?  Well, one attempt at a solution that I've heard is that everything back then was attributed to God, and so, when prophets lie, that is attributed to God, even though God did not cause their lying.  It amazes me that many evangelicals like to thump their chests about how committed they are to the Bible, yet there are salient cases when many of them fail to take what the Bible is saying at face value, or they imply that we should not accept the worldview of the biblical authors.

These are the sorts of issues that John Anderson discusses in his book.  He states his thesis on page 1: "I contend that God is intimately involved in and at times complicit in Jacob's deceptions----a notion that gives rise to an issue that is theological in nature.  What does this deception reveal about God?" Anderson apparently disagrees with the evangelical narratives that I discuss above: that God disapproves of Jacob's lying, and that God himself does not engage in deception.  Anderson believes that the opposite is the case, yet (if I'm not mistaken) he will try to see theological value in that.

In my reading thus far, Anderson mentions a variety of interesting things: the idea of divine deception in ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and even Native American stories, and also in the Hebrew Bible; how the Book of Jubilees (26:18) says that God was actually assisting Jacob's deception of Isaac; and the twenty year debate between scholars R.W.L. Moberly and James Barr about whether the serpent in Genesis 2-3 was right in what he said, namely, that Adam and Eve would not die after eating the fruit but would become like gods.

I think that it's difficult to identify what God thinks about Jacob's deceptions because, many times, we're not told explicitly.  As Anderson notes, there are times when God affirms his commitment to Jacob, without mentioning any disapproval of Jacob's lying.  But how can we know that God was actually assisting Jacob in Jacob's deceptions?  On page 79, Anderson notes parallels between Rebecca and Jacob's deception of Isaac in Genesis 27, and Genesis 21 and 24, in which God's role is more salient.  In Genesis 21, God tells Abraham to listen to Sarah and send off Hagar and Ishmael.  In Genesis 24, God is involved in leading Abraham's servant to Rebecca, the one who is to be Isaac's wife.  Anderson's argument appears to be that, because God is active in Genesis 21 and 24, and because there are parallels between these two chapters and Genesis 27, then God is active in Genesis 27.  Anderson states that, in Genesis 27, "Despite not appearing on stage, God is mysteriously at work in the deception of Isaac."  Whether Anderson's argument sets right with me, I can't really say.  I'd prefer for Genesis 27 to explicitly say that God is at work in Jacob's deception of Isaac, if that is its point; but I cannot rule out that Genesis 27 may be alluding to stories in which God is active.

As I said earlier in this post, a prominent evangelical narrative about the Book of Genesis is that God showed the patriarchs grace----that God blessed them, even though they did not deserve God's blessing.  But Anderson may be challenging that narrative, too.  Anderson states on pages 50-51: "God does not appear at Bethel and cast moral judgment on Jacob and Rebekah's shenanigans; God does not appear and castigate, rebuke, or reprimand Jacob.  Rather, God confers the promise on the most wily, and deserving, of patriarchs!"

I'm enjoying this book so far.  In tomorrow's post, I may address how Anderson deals with the argument that God showed disapproval of Jacob's deception by arranging for Jacob to be deceived by Laban, when Laban gave Jacob Leah instead of Rachel.

Ishmael on Hagar's Back

Genesis 21:14 says (in the King James Version): “And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.”  The context is that Abraham is sending out Hagar and her son Ishmael because Abraham’s wife Sarah does not want for Hagar to share in the inheritance with Sarah’s son, Isaac.

Genesis 21:14 is often lampooned, or it is cited to show that the Bible has different sources, or that an editor clumsily threw together different stories in Genesis.  The reason is that Genesis 21:14 appears to say that Abraham put Ishmael on Hagar’s back.  Why would Abraham put Ishmael on Hagar’s back?  He wasn’t a baby at this point!  Earlier in the Book of Genesis, in Genesis 17, Ishmael was circumcised at the age of 13!

I found two attempts at a solution to this problem.  First, there’s that of the Protestant commentator John Gill.  In the Hebrew, it says (in my literal translation) “And Abraham rose early in the morning, and he took bread and a water-skin of water and he gave to Hagar.  He put on her shoulder, and the boy, and he sent her and she went and she wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.”  According to Gill, the text is not saying that Abraham put Ishmael on Hagar’s back.  Rather, Gill thinks that “the boy” goes with “he gave to Hagar”, not “He put on her shoulder”.  It’s almost as if Gill treats “He put on her shoulder” as parenthetical.  For Gill, Abraham gave Hagar bread and a water-skin and put those on her shoulder, and he also gave Hagar Ishmael, which means that Abraham “delivered him into her hand, to be taken care of by her; and very probably she led him in her hand”.  Whether this works, I don’t know.  I have to admit that “and the boy” is in a pretty awkward place in the verse!

The second solution is that of Genesis Rabbah 53:13.  It says that Sarah gave Ishmael the evil eye, and so Ishmael got sick.  As a result, Hagar had to carry Ishmael on her back.  I do admire the rabbis for their creativity!

Imperfect, Yet Understandable?

I'm reading the Flood story in Genesis.  I was trying to justify the Flood, since I reasoned that God is perfect and thus his acts should inspire me, as they inspire so many evangelical Christians who read the Bible.  But I had a hard time arriving at a justification for the Flood that satisfied me or made me feel good.

Then, I considered: Perhaps I am right to feel sad about the vast bulk of humanity and animals perishing in the Flood.  God himself may have regretted sending it, for God promised never to send another Flood again, and God resolved to put up with humanity's sinfulness after the Flood had subsided.  God even put his war-bow in the sky, perhaps as a sign of peace that indicated that he would not wage war against humanity.

Once I considered the possibility that God in the Bible was not absolutely perfect, even his sending of the Flood appeared to be understandable.  Extreme, mind you, but understandable.  God regretted creating human beings when he beheld their corruption, their violence, and the way that the boundary between humans and the divine was being breached, as the sons of God married the daughters of men.  God appreciated the one righteous man he could find.  Perhaps God went too far in wiping out most of life with the Flood, but God's love for righteousness and disgust with wickedness was understandable.

There are Christians who will have a problem with what I just wrote.  They claim that God changing his mind is not literal but is figurative, for God is perfect and does not need to change his mind.  Why can't they take the Bible at face-value, when they criticize others for not taking the Bible literally, in areas?

Where Did Cain Get His Wife?

Where did Cain get his wife?  Many contend that Cain married his sister, for Genesis 5:4 affirms that Adam had sons and daughters.  But I’m skeptical of this, for a variety of reasons:

1.  After Cain killed Abel, God gave Eve Seth as a replacement for Abel (Genesis 4:25).  Eve was elated that God gave her other seed!  In my opinion, that makes more sense if Cain and Abel were her only children prior to that point: she was sad that she lost both of her children (Cain left and Abel was killed), and so she viewed God giving her Seth as a consolation.  But why would that be the case, if she had other sons and daughters at that time?

2.  Genesis 5:4 says (in the KJV): “And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters”.  That appears to me to be saying that Adam begot those sons and daughters after he had begotten Seth.  Is not Seth mentioned in this genealogy because he is technically the firstborn, after Cain left the family and Abel was killed?

(UPDATE: As I look at the genealogies in Genesis 10-11, my impression is that genealogies do not necessarily focus on the firstborn.  Rather, they focus on the figure who can get them where they want to go.  Arpachshad was probably not the firstborn of Shem, for other sons of Shem are mentioned before him in Genesis 10.  But he is listed as the son of Shem in Genesis 11 because he's the ancestor of Abraham, and the genealogy wants to arrive at Abraham.  Similarly, I think that the people listed in Genesis 5 are not listed because they are the firstborn, but rather because the genealogy aims to culminate with Noah, and so it mentions his ancestors.)

3.  Genesis 4:16 says that Cain left to go to the land of Nod.  There is no mention of a wife leaving with him.  Then Cain is in the land of Nod in v 17, and he has a wife!

TV preacher Arnold Murray, if I understand him correctly, teaches that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 describe two separate creations: God created one set of human beings in Genesis 1, and another set in Genesis 2.  In this scenario, Cain went to the land of Nod and took a wife there, and she was one of the offspring of the first creation.  But I have problems with this view for two reasons.  First, Genesis 2:5 says that, prior to Adam, there was no man to till the soil.  Why would this be, when God already created human beings in Genesis 1?  Second, Genesis 5 essentially equates Adam—-the man of Genesis 2 who eventually begot Seth—-with the man who was created in God’s image in Genesis 1.

Perhaps there are responses that can be made to my reasons for my dissatisfaction with the argument that Cain married his sister.  Maybe Eve had a daughter (who married Cain) before Cain left, and she was the only child Eve had at that time apart from Cain and Abel.  When this daughter left with Cain, Eve was bereft of seed.  And Eve did not mention her perhaps because Eve didn’t think that daughters were as important as sons.  Regarding my third reason, perhaps Cain’s wife was not mentioned as departing with Cain because Cain was the head of the family.  Similarly, in the story of the akedah in Genesis 22, we read in v 19 that Abraham came down from the mountain, and there is no reference to Isaac coming down too.

Questions About Genesis 1:28-29

Each night, I pray ten minutes before I go to bed, and I decided a few days ago to incorporate Bible reading into that.  Essentially, I will read a passage, and then I will talk about it in my prayer.  I figure that it’s better for me to do that than it is for me to struggle to find things to say, or to talk primarily about my day and my plans (which is not to say that I can’t talk to God about those things).  I may blog about some of my thoughts from those daily quiet times, but I won’t obligate myself to do so.  For one, I don’t want to impose on myself another blogging obligation.  Plus, there are some thoughts that I like to keep personal—-rather than displaying them on the Internet for the public.

What has amazed me about my reading so far is that I have had questions rather than answers.  I was expecting to go through the same-old stories and to say the same-old things about them—-things that I have learned from biblical scholarship and other sources.  Instead, I’ve had questions.

Let me give you an example.  Genesis 1:28-29 states (in the KJV): “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”

The word translated as “replenish” is rendered as “fill” in many other translations because the root m-l-aleph often relates to filling.  I have two questions (or categories of questions):

1.  So the first man and woman are to fill the earth.  That appears to contradict what I was taught about Genesis, which is that, had Adam and Eve not sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, they would have stayed in the Garden of Eden for all of their lives, as would their descendants.  Is there a contradiction between Genesis 1, in which God at creation tells the man and the woman to fill the earth, and Genesis 2, in which Adam and Eve leave the Garden and inaugurate the process of filling the earth only after their transgression of God’s command?

I realize that many scholars say that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different creation accounts—-that Genesis 1 is by P and that Genesis 2 is by J (or whoever).  But they disagree about whether or not P knew of J’s creation account and was trying to supplement it, thereby creating a sort of “Fall” story in which human beings fall from a state of being good.  Does P in Genesis 1 manifest any awareness of Genesis 2, in which God appears to intend for humans to obey him and thus be cooped up in a Garden for the rest of their lives?  Or would P think that the transgression was the means by which humans could begin to obey God’s command to fill the earth?

2.  Many maintain that Adam and Eve were to be vegetarians, and that human beings were allowed to eat meat only after the Flood, as a concession to human brutality.  This view makes a degree of sense, for, in Genesis 1, God tells human beings that they can eat plants, without mentioning eating animals.  But God specifically tells humans that they can eat animals in Genesis 9:3.

But here’s my question: What does God mean when he tells the man and the woman to have dominion over fish and fowl?  Why would we want dominion over fish and fowl, except to eat them?  Does God granting the first man and woman dominion over fish and fowl imply that he was allowing them to eat those creatures?